Son[i]a #353
Teresa Lanceta
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Teresa Lanceta is an artist, art historian, researcher, and teacher. Her work is permeated by the intimate, hypnotic, repetitive act of weaving, the slowness of which allows her to converse with a drawn-out, spiritual time that is not easy for us to attain. A kind of time/life from which she can respond to the fragmented time of work hours, study hours, leisure hours.
Her practice allows her to time travel through the open source code of weaving as a form of collective thinking. A language made up of wool, wefts, rhombus patterns, and other alterities, in which an extended practice has established spaces of non-verbal communication with the women of the Middle Atlas and the southern part of the High Atlas, by means of connections with their methods and their textile heritage. The work of nomad weavers who she then gratefully acknowledges, and which helps her to rethink artistic work in terms of co-authorship and creative complicity. Teresa’s works negotiate space with the eye that looks and classifies from the perspective of ethnology and ethnography: a world anchored to the categories that endorse or authorise it, and as such disregard the know-how inherited from ways of life other than those of capitalist society.
In this conversation with Teresa Lanceta, the sense of touch reclaims space from the gaze. At the same time, we recover the wisdom of weaving in terms of community, as an open source code for those who know and perform it. And through this repetitive, necessary gesture, technique becomes form, and form becomes language. Thus the margins disappear and give way to rhombuses, torn bits, darning, mending… depending on what’s going on at that moment in time. A practice of thinking and making with others, and a journey of journeys though which a myriad of mundane objects speak: skeins of wool, cushions, rugs, water jugs, and beach towels.
Bouchra Khalili
Through a practice that combines documentary, conceptual art, installation, and oral storytelling, Bouchra Khalili explores questions of self-representation, political agency, and the resistance strategies of individuals and communities rendered invisible by the colonial, oppressive, and exclusionary dynamics of nation-states. Who is a witness? Who tells the story? Who documents, archives, and transmits the accounts that reach us? These are the central questions that run through all of Khalili’s work. In this podcast, we talk to Bouchra Khalili about what it means to produce images and to approach film and documentary practice from new places and perspectives.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the conversation with artist, weaver, writer, poet and indigenous researcher Elvira Espejo Ayca that we were unable to include the first time around. We talked about the flow of linguistic structures and writing processes, introducing the notion of “oraliture” and the importance of the rhythm of song in the exchanges that take place in her community.
Elvira Espejo Ayca
Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.
Grant Watson
We sat down with curator and researcher Grant Watson to talk about textiles and their material and social ramifications. Instead, we ended up talking about his interview-based practice, essentially producing an extremely meta interview on interviews and interviewing. In this podcast, Grant talks about enacting, editing, demographics, transference, capturing the atmosphere of an interview, and other issues that he explores in one of his main ongoing projects, How We Behave.
Luz Pichel
Luz Pichel is a poet. Her writing comes out of all those places and even others that she did not physically visit but reached through curiosity, imagination, and empathy. The tension between major and minor languages, the liberating potential of a non-stabilised and nob-folklorising use of dialect and the crack of invention opened up by memory and childhood, are some of the paths that her poetry explores.